The LM3914 LED bar graph driver was an amazing chip back in the day. Along with the LM3915, its logarithmic cousin, these chips gave a modern look to projects, allowing dancing LEDs to stand in for a ...

Actual microcontrollers have powerful bidirectional I/O ports, and you can use different techniques to fully exploit such capabilities. Recent Design Ideas described the “Charlieplexing” method as an ...

Microcontroller port pins can typically be driven either high or low, or else be put into an "input" or high-impedance state. This circuit uses the three states to drive two separate LEDs with one ...

Hi there, and welcome to Part 3 of this soon-to-be-heralded mega-mini-series. In Part 1, we discussed the first vacuum tube diodes, moved on to their solid-state (semiconductor) descendants, and then ...

Eight-pin microcontrollers offer numerous peripheral features. However, the maximum number of I/O pins available is often limited to six, since two pins would be required for the chip's power supply.

In this project, the RGB LED contains 3 LEDs encased in one shell which looks like a single white LED except that it has for leads where one lead is for the common ground and one for each LED. During ...

[Konstantin] had some extra 27C256 EPROMS lying around and decided to use them to animate an 8×8 LED matrix. He’s not only using them to store data, but driving the display with them as well. The chip ...